We like butts. We like big butts, and we cannot lie. All butts. Except cigarette butts.
Cigarette butts are the number one most littered item on the planet, and they leach toxins. More than 1.69 BILLION-WITH-A-B pounds of cigarette butts are discarded every year. And, of course, smoking is still the number one cause of preventable death in America.
So it was truth's objective to make not smoking cigarettes relevant to a critical teen audience by connecting smoking to the things they care about most—like the environment. And butts.
We wanted to get a little cheeky and spread the word to as many teens as possible that ALL butts are better than cigarette butts so they could join truth's revolution to end cigarette smoking for good.
Our goal was to top previous environmentally-focused videos we'd created and exceed 15 million views. We also wanted to kick our own caboose and show butts could inspire at least 2 million engagements on social and drive 30,000 completes on quizzes we created related to the video because we know social is a key driver of site-side engagement.
Our strategy was to pair a mid-length video full of adorable, colorful booties, buns and keisters with the type of beats that make you wanna shake what your mama gave you. This combo was sure to draw attention to the fact that cigarette butts are toxic, making them the worst butt around.
We paired our video with interactive quizzes, asking our audience to find out either which butt they were, or how much they actually knew about cigarette butt litter.
We launched this initiative around Earth Day for maximum impact. When people are looking for earth-friendly facts and content, we deliver. Unexpectedly.
By rolling out our highly shareable video and gif content across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat around Earth Day, we were able to naturally join the existing conversation and bring focus to our own macro issue—ending cigarette smoking—while showing our audience that all butts are better than cigarette butts.
Across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat, our Better Butts creative received a total of 27.7 million views, doubling all our previous environmentally-focused creative, and smashing our goal of 15 million views. And we received more than 3 million engagements--well beyond our 2 million goal.
We had more than 52,000 quiz completes on thetruth.com, which drove a conversion rate of 13.8% and helped us prove our case that social content can be an incredible driver of site-side engagements.
But most importantly, we dropped some badonkadonk on a holiday devoted to the trees to get people to think twice about how smoking impacts the things they care about.
